TimelineFX Particle Effects Editor

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Create amazing particle effects for your games, applications and web pages with TimelineFX

Export the particle effects as static animations onto sprite sheets, animation strips or image sequences in PNG format, or if you develop for the iPhone or iPad, you can export using the PVRTC format (Mac only). If you program games using the powerful Blitzmax programming language, you can also use the effects directly using the TimelineFX Module.

Create an endless amount of different and varied particle effects including explosions, smoke, fire, water, steam, bubbles, and much more! Animations can be easily configured to loop seamlessly with just one click of the mouse, and with another click, you can even make animations tile seamlessly too for use as animated textures.

Create a vast range of particle effects

Including smoke, fire, explosions, water, flares, clouds and much more! Plus, we also have plenty of free effects for you to download.

Complete control with a powerful graphing system

Particle emitters have 24 attributes to control your effects with precision using graphs to draw their behaviour overtime

Export your effects directly to sprite sheets

Easily export to sprite sheets with a wide range options, you can even export to PVRTC format specifically for iPhone as well as PNG, TGA and GIF.

Seamlessly loop your animations with 1 click!

In TimelineFX it’s easy to create an animation that loops seamlessly (like the ones shown on this page!), just check the Loop Animation box and you’re done!

Create textures that tile seamlessly

As well as creating animations that loop seamlessly, you can even make them tile seamlessly too, great for use as textures in 3D games and backdrops

As simple or as complex effects as you want

Create a simple effect with 1 emitter, or go crazy with multiple emitters with there own sub effects, you’re only limited by your imagination!

More Details

Export your animations onto sprite sheets, animation strips or image sequences

Once you’re happy with an effect, export it using the Animation Controls. Record frame sizes up to 8192 x 8192 with transparency, plus some very handy features such as:

Loop Animation: With one click you can make your effects loop seamlessly!
Make Seamless: Need to create animated textures that can be tiled seamlessly? No problem, just 1 check box and that’s exactly what you’ll get!
Multiple Export Options: Render animations in full colour, grey scale, 1 colour alpha and more. Handy if you want to create animated particles for your own particle systems, or apply your own colours dynamically within your game. Additionally, you can save as a sprite sheet, where animation frames are kept in rows and columns, animation strips, or just a sequence of images saved separately.
Handy Auto fit feature: One click and your animation be automatically resized to fit within your chosen frame size.
Export to PVRTC format: For iPhone/iPad developers, export to this format enabling much higher performance on those hand held devices (Mac only)

Easily edit your particle effects

A full range of properties are available to fine tune all of the particle effects you create for your games. Change how particles are drawn on top of each other with an additive blend mode. Adjust how each particle’s colour changes over time, plus, change angle, emission, particle shape settings and much more. All accessible with an easy to use interface, just adjust settings with a few clicks and instantly see your changes in the preview pane.

A particle shape is a bitmap which can be anything you desire for your effect. On top of that, they can also be animated to add even more depth and complexity to your particle effects to help your games come alive. Simply load in your shapes and assign them to any emitter you want, all properties you have set such as colour and blend mode will be instantly applied.

Total control using powerful graphs and attributes

The TimelineFX Particle Effect Editor uses a powerful graphing system to provide full control over your effects. This means that every aspect of your effects can be precisely controlled over the life time of the effect. Just select an attribute such as size overtime, and plot it’s behaviour on the graph tab to easily make all the particles spawned by an emitter grow or shrink over the lifetime of the particle.

Many attributes are available for you to finely tune your particle effects, such as, amount, life, velocity, spin, stretch, alpha and many more.

Just plot all your points on the graph according to how you want your particles to behave, and if you want even more precise control, convert graph points to curves for even smoother results.

Plenty of effects libraries freely availble!

Make use of our royalty free Particle Effects, featuring explosions, smoke, fire, environmental effects like rain snow and wind, flares, auras and much more.

You can either make use of them as they are or use them as a basis and tweak them to suit your own needs as you see fit. Click here to go straight to the emitters download page. Simply download a library and load into the editor, make your changes and export.

New Particle Effect libraries are being added all the time so keep checking back to see what’s new!

Use directly in Blitzmax and Monkey

You can also use TimelineFX directly within Blitzmax and Monkey by make use of the respective TimelineFX libraries for each languange. Monkey gives the unique advantage that you can code and use TimelineFX for multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, Flash, HTML5 and more!

The library is incredibly easy to use with a powerful particle manager designed to do all the hard work for you. Head on over to the downloads page to grab the libraries, They’re completely free and released under the MIT license.

Screen Shots:

Make use of animated particles to create even more complex looking effects

Easily manage all of your particle shapes

Export onto sprite sheets,individual frames, image strips or as a gif

Prepare your animation with an easy to use interface

Loads of attributes that use powerful graphs to describe particle behaviour overtime

Create point, area, line and ellipse effects

Change the colour over time, blend mode, angle, image handle and much more

Change many properties of your particle emitters

Create any kind of particle effect that you can imagine

Manage global properties of each effect on the effects tab

Import and use any number of particle shapes that you need

Export your effects to sprite sheets and animation strips

Plenty of control on particle tab to fine tune our effecs

Easily import effects from other effects libraries

Total control of your effects can be achieved using graphs to plot particle behaviour